


then the rain fell upward

by WolfSpider



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Other Minor/Background Pairings - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:53:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25704679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfSpider/pseuds/WolfSpider
Summary: The White Violin has been the Umbrella Academy's arch nemesis since they were all seventeen years old. Now, after decades apart, Number Five is coming home to stop his family's feud from causing the apocalypse that ruined his life-- by giving Vanya whatever she wants.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 26
Kudos: 162





	then the rain fell upward

**Author's Note:**

> As marked, this fic will feature descriptions of graphic violence as well as eventual sexual content in a later chapter. Five is physically sixteen throughout.
> 
> This one is dedicated to my long time partner @Pretzelcoatlus, who told me to write her an AU featuring the White Violin as a villain over a year ago. Better late than never?

It wasn’t raining yet, but it would be soon.

Diego had watched the clouds roll in over the course of a long half-hour while the sun went down, a deep purple wall over the dark bay that arrived with an abnormal quickness. The dew point had dropped like a stone down a well and the air was now thick and oppressively damp inside the car, cold wet humidity that clung to the hair on his forearms. When he cranked the window down a crack, the night breeze rolling off the bay smelled sweetly brackish, like flotsam and rot, and it caught in the back of Diego’s throat.

Nights like this were when the shit went down. It was the last dragging edge of winter, and everyone was restless; you could feel it in the stifling air, like something was building up under the surface of the city, ready to burst. One of the hooded streetlamps lining the boardwalk flickered as the first fat raindrop splattered on the cracked concrete and the dashboard radio crackled with its own overloaded static, obscuring the distant scrambled voices of police officers calling their codes across the airwaves. Diego wasn’t supposed to still have the address for this frequency. He did anyway; it was one of a few things he’d thought it better not to forget.

Klaus shifted forward to lean between the shabby leather front seats, snapping his black-polished fingers with jovial impatience next to Diego’s ear. “Hey, Diego, focus,” he prompted. “Waffles, remember?”

Diego grunted in vague dissent, still staring out at the water and the urban coastline beyond, lit up with a cluster of neon lights. The air pressure was centered somewhere over the city, he could feel it throbbing in his forehead like a migraine. He hadn’t consented to waffles, anyway, but then when had that ever mattered? “She’s doing something,” he said. The far off howl of a siren drifted in through the open window. “This storm isn’t natural.”

“Well, you know what they say.” Klaus gave a jerky roll of his shoulder, shrugging it all off like he always did. “When it rains, you need an Umbrella.” The tattoo was faded on the inside of his wrist where it poked out of the faux fur-rimmed sleeve of his long coat, and Diego unconsciously rubbed at the inside of his own wrist where the mark still burned like a brand fresh-applied.

Beside Klaus in the back seat, Ben snorted and mumbled something largely unintelligible. He had his head tipped drunkenly back over the back of the seat, neck propped on the shallow headrest, hood pulled up to cover his pale, gaunt face and dark sunken eyes. Klaus snickered and muttered something back that Diego wasn’t privy to, and Diego squeezed his wrist harder, until he could feel the thin bones there strain and bend, fingertips bloodless pushing into flesh. A hundred times he’d thought to get rid of it, have it carved off his skin with lasers or covered up with some more worthy design. But there it still was, mocking, a part of him, Dad’s dog tag.

So here he was, still playing watch dog.

“I don’t feel like waffles,” Diego said, eyes forward. There was pale blue lightning in the clouds, flashing, flirting with touching down. The clouds that boiled over the jagged fangs of the metropolitan skyline, billowing and churning.

“Let’s vote,” Klaus suggested, rocking back. “All in favor?”

Abruptly Ben groaned, leaning over to pop the back passenger door open and vomit onto the asphalt. He retched for the longest minute of Diego’s life, and when he sat up again, taking deep wheezing breaths that echoed in his chest cavity like a death rattle, Klaus said. “That’s an ‘aye’.”

Ben jabbed him shakily in the ribs, and Klaus let him. “Abstain,” he said in a voice that cracked down the middle. “I’m gonna stay in the car anyway.”

Now Diego let his gaze flick back to his brother through the rear view mirror, just for a second. Long enough to see the fabric of his t-shirt rippling ominously, burgeoning where it stretched across his stomach. “You need me to drop you at home?”

“No.” Ben shook his head sharply. “That’s… worse. I just can’t eat.”

“Morning sickness’s bad today, huh?” Klaus asked sympathetically, patting his hand where it gripped the car seat. It was like being pregnant, a little, playing host to the writhing incipient body of a malicious entity that wanted nothing more than to birth itself into this universe. Every time Ben indulged it, it grew bolder. The taste of blood fed it, nourished it, encouraged it. Diego told himself every time that Ben was going to stay in the car for the scuffles, too, but inevitably when someone pulled a gun faster than Diego could draw a knife or they were surrounded he would emerge, and the creature would claw its way out of his belly again. The last time-- in the cavernous dark opera house while the air sang with music that scraped at the insides of his eardrums until Diego was down on his knees and screaming-- when _she_ was there--

That had been the last time. Diego was determined. He huffed out a frustrated, angry breath, and forced his white-knuckled grasp on the steering wheel to relax. He switched off the car radio with its constant feed of threats and alerts and tore his attention away from the gathering storm. “Okay, fuck it,” he agreed through gritted teeth, feeling the old strain in his jaw as it pulled down into his neck. “Let’s go to Griddy’s.”

“Whatever you want, Number One.”

As he peeled away from the curve and back towards the Interstate, a spear of lightning touched down.

\---

The sensation was different than it had been before. Less like stepping through a door left carelessly ajar that he could wedge himself through, less like being a glass that the tablecloth had been deftly whisked out from under, more like he was being squeezed through a tube of toothpaste head first. Quantum tunneling wasn’t supposed to feel like a literal tunnel, pinning his limbs to his sides and making his skin prickle and dissolve. It wasn’t supposed to be like the transporters in a dozen old Star Trek episodes he’d watched bored on basic cable in some motel 6 with bloodstained towels drying on the shower bar in the bathroom, taken apart atom by atom and put together somewhere else.

It was _wrong_ , and Five’s mouth tasted like battery acid when he stumbled through the rift on trembling legs, suddenly awkward and coltish in a way his creaky knees hadn’t been for decades. It was all… gone. His legs were weak and unsure but the stiffness when he stepped down on his right had disappeared. His hands, when he glanced down at them, were trembling with the soft tremors of interdimensional aftershocks, but were no longer gnarled and liver spotted; the skin was fresh. There was a scar at the inside of his right thumb where it met the webbing of his palm, where he’d cut himself with a rusty can opener trying desperately to get at a hunk of expiring processed tuna fish at sixteen-approximately that he always looked for (he’d been so hungry, so hungry and so thin, and worse than having to wonder for days if he’d given himself tetanus and was going to die slowly in a world devoid of unexpired antibiotics was the fact that he’d wasted the food, dropped the can when the pain seared into his skin) and he could see in the fading blue light that it was still there, a pink-silver line of raised flesh that hadn’t sealed right.

The jagged line of scar tissue looked _new_.

Five swore under his breath, and looked up. At least he’d landed where he meant to, given a margin of error of a few hundred feet down and up. What tragic irony, that the safest place he could have thought of to suddenly reappear in 2019 was back at the old family home. Five had intended to flash back into his childhood bedroom, in and out of the house quick and unnoticed, and he winced realizing he’d still have to get up there, if only to try to find a change of clothes. He didn’t know if his uniforms from age thirteen would fit his sixteen year old body, he’d already hit a growth spurt by this point, but the rumpled standard issue Commission suit hung uncomfortably loose on him, and he’d rather deal with shirts cinched too tight around the elbows than pantlegs he could too easily trip over. He’d blinked back into the courtyard instead, and it was much like he’d remembered it; drab, subdued, a garden that almost never saw the sun.

It was night now, and the moon was hidden behind clouds; the silver face of it didn’t look down on the bronze face of Luther’s statue, still stalwart and triumphant even in death, posed like he’d been in all the press pictures from after his return from space. Five stared up at it for a moment, trying to see the similarities in their faces. Luther would have been about this age when he’d died. That was on page 238 of Vanya’s book, _radiation poisoning_ , and even through impersonal prose he’d been able to hear the vicious curl of bitterness in her voice as he’d read it.

When he turned towards the doors to the hall, Pogo was there. He gripped the doorway with a silver-furred hand, expressive simian mouth turned down in a bemusedly mild frown. Five wasn’t sure why either of them were surprised; after a long mission abroad, Pogo had always been there to welcome the children home. And he was a child again, in appearance only. “Number Five?” he suggested, letting it hang in the still night air.

“Good to see you again, Pogo,” Five said, internally wincing as he drew himself up to his new height and strode closer, towards the doors. This voice, so young and reedy, was unrecognizable to him. _You have a second chance_ , he thought to himself. _You can do it over again._ But he didn’t, really. If it had been a second chance, he would have popped out of the wormhole thirteen and utterly unchanged, not scarred inside and out by the ash of the apocalypse. “Do me a favor and wait to alert the old man until I’m gone, will you?”

He brushed past Pogo into the kitchen, which was only moderately less rude than just jumping up to his room without a word would have been. “Your Father is sleeping,” he said, a touch reproachfully, and Five snorted. The kitchens were dark, and Five paused to rifle through the cupboards by sparse city light leaking in through the grubby windows, a pit opening up in his stomach. Instinct itched at him to ransack them, stuff everything that still looked edible into his pockets and disappear. Half a decade with the Commission hadn’t cured him of the habit; he’d cleared every motel room out of its supply of sugar packets and single-serve nondairy creamers, even though he took his coffee black as sin. He could feel Pogo’s dark eyes burning into his back. “Are you hungry? Miss Vanya used to leave sandwiches out for you thinking of this day, you know.”

“I know,” Five said shortly, slamming a cabinet with as much restraint as he could muster. No coffee, and no marshmallows, either. “I read all about it.”

The book was still heavy in the inside pocket of his too-large suit jacket, hanging right over his heart. There was a copy on the book shelf in the living room when he walked past it, too, pages pristine and spine unbroken as he paused there to ease it from its shelf, stare into her dead-fish eyes on the cover and read the inscription inside. _Extra-Ordinary: The Life and Confessions of the White Violin._ His own copy was dog-eared and yellowing almost beyond recognition, cover scuffed and pages filled with crabbed, frantic writing in ballpoint pen and then, finally, in his own blood. Five slid the book back between its bracketing volumes and marched on down the hall, feeling the stiffness of nearly fifty years fall on him all at once.

He still walked with a slight shuffling limp; it was irritating, knowing it was psychosomatic and being unable to cure himself of it nonetheless. The old injury that had caused him to favor his left side wouldn’t happen for another fifteen years, when his leg would go through a crush of ashy grey snow and down into a pothole that cracked the remains of the road wide and deep. His own voice, small with the shock of the hurt, would echo against the ice and what remained of main street’s storefronts as he wrenched himself free and snapped his leg back into place. Except it wouldn’t happen again, because it already had, and his hindbrain knew it even if the sinews and ligaments in his no longer ruined knee didn’t. He sprinted up the stairs two at a time just to prove he could and then jumped the final flight, landing just inside his own door.

The room was perfect. Undisturbed, a pristine (if dust-covered) time capsule from the day he’d left, seventeen or forty years ago, save for the covers of his bed pulled messily back. When he bent to sniff the pillow it still smelled faintly of her hair: _Vanya_. The way he remembered, warm and sweet, like the cheap, serviceable shampoo that their father had Grace buy for her. Cheap bastard, he had all the money in the world, he could have afforded to not be frugal even for the sake of his least favorite child. It would have been nothing to him.

But the pillow smelled like her, which meant that she had slept here. How many times after he had left? He didn’t know. He could imagine her small body curled up beneath his sheets, long dark hair fanned across his pillow, weeping as quietly as she could with an inconsolable hurt. Anger and pity flared inside him like heartburn, clawing its way up his throat. If he thought of her as that girl instead of what she had become, he could complete his mission. Not even Five, who had evinced not a single scruple in the course of his meticulous and exacting work over the last few years, could imagine himself pulling the trigger, putting that girl down like a rabid dog. Not Vanya, who had cried for him not just then but dozens of times.

The door creaked open and there Pogo was again, watching him from another doorway as Five shrugged off his jacket and shirt and folded them on the bed. There were still seven faintly mothball-scented copies of his old Academy blazer hung in the wardrobe, seven starched white shirts for underneath that hung a little snugly but more or less fine on his thin chest. Five could still see his ribs rising under the skin there, not quite as emaciated and malnourished as he would eventually get but obviously having lost a bit of muscle tone already, cannibalized to feed the revolt of a body that was always complaining at him for more food, more water, more rest. The blazer fit over him like a straight jacket.

Five hesitated over the book, unsure if he wanted to pick it back up. If she discovered it on him, it would be a liability. A vulnerability. All the notes he’d accumulated in its margins were firmly committed to memory regardless, he didn’t need the physical item. The totem of his failure. He brushed his fingertips down its glossy cover one final time, hesitating over her face, and then made a clean break with the sentimentality of it, suddenly feeling like he would throw it in the fire if he could. He didn’t need it. He knew where he was going. Instead he left it, and only tucked his revolver into the back of his belt.

“Many things have happened that the book does not contain,” Pogo said carefully, his expression unreadable. Five nodded. “Be careful, Master Five.”

Five turned to look at himself in the mirror. He knew his eyes were wild, half-mad, his hair was only hastily smoothed back. His face was the face of a stranger, a version of himself he’d never seen smirking from the pages of a Teen Beat tabloid or staring gimlet-eyed into the camera for his official Commission ID badge. He hadn’t had the eyes of a killer when he’d left, but then again, Vanya hadn’t either. There were things in those notes he couldn’t forget if he’d tried, scribbled from Commission files while easily distractible secretaries were preoccupied elsewhere.

_On the thirty-first day of March, 2019, Vanya Hargreeves, a.k.a. the White Violin, will fight the surviving members of her adoptive family for the final time. She will [CLEARANCE LEVEL REDACTED] ...and the Apocalypse will begin._

She would be alone, in her madness, her anger, her despair, with no one to counterbalance. Five knew what that was like. He grit his teeth in a vicious expression that was not a human kind of smile. “I know,” he said. “If you’re smart, Pogo, you’ll stay out of it.”

The bedroom filled with a blinding flash of light, and Five went.

\---

The rain began at one minute after midnight, localized above one specific building on one specific block in one specific section of the city. It came down in relentless sheets, drumming against the roof, a rush of water straight down without wind, pouring and pouring endlessly, like god Herself was attempting to wash an otherwise unassuming glass and steel office building away. The torrent pounded so hard and so long that the deluge slopped over the concrete curb and flooded the street, overwhelming the thin slots of storm drains. Five, touching down in the mouth of an alley across the way, quietly accepted that he was going to get soaked. Much worse things had happened to him than his socks being wet.

There was a light on in a window on the third floor, flickering with pulses of discharge. Five hesitated just a moment, rainwater soaking slowly through the soles of his shoes. There was always a danger in jumping to places sight unseen; he’d learned that the hard way when at age ten he’d tried to blink into Vanya’s room after hours and wound up in a hall closet instead, the handle of a broom speared through his abdomen and his shirt soaking with warm blood. His father had demanded that Grace not dose him with anything while she removed it and closed the hole. How was the boy meant to learn from pain if he couldn’t feel it?

If he waited, she might be gone. He’d memorized this time, this place, a dispassionate typewritten list of the addresses of her other recent attacks that the records department had provided to him without question when he’d asked, after his third promotion. Top secret. Burn after reading. The next one wouldn’t happen for a few days, and he didn’t want to wait that long. He wanted to catch her at it. Lightning forked overhead and Five focused on the window, the light, the memory of his sister’s face, leaving the flooded alley behind.

He landed between two rows of desks with a thump and a displacement of air that shifted several stacks of papers, in the darkened hall outside the office; misjudged again, jumped a little too far. The door to the manager’s corner office was gaping open like a wound, spilling light onto the grey corporate carpeting, illuminating the tableau. The shell of a man who had once been in his mid fifties, ruddy-faced and balding, slumped back in his ergonomic leather chair, lips purple and open, head lolled limp onto his shoulder. The cause of death was not obviously external, but Five remembered the autopsy reports: every organ ruptured, vibrated apart. Vanya was standing over the corpse in the spotlight provided by a desk lamp knocked to its side on the floor, hunched above him with her violin under her chin, a wolf over a corpse. She looked like she was about to tear into his belly with her teeth.

The sound attracted her attention. A piece of brown hair, shockingly dark against her bloodless face, fell into the staring moons of her eyes, and she straightened to brush it back behind her ear, turning to face him, head curiously cocked. “It’s you,” she said, wonderingly, the strings of her violin vibrating resonant with her voice.

“It’s me,” Five said, offering her a smile he didn’t all the way feel as he took a cautious step towards her. Briefly the corner of her mouth twitched upward, softening the blank death mask of her expression, but he knew the moment when she saw and registered his outfit, the blazer, the patch embroidered smartly on the breast, followed the animal instinct of her thought process. He’d marked himself as an enemy. “Fuck,” he growled. “Vanya--”

She raised her bow to the strings like an archer drawing back to loose an arrow at his heart, and it was-- horrible. Discordant, the sound shaking him apart, reaching inside him and turning the noise of his own body against him. The screeching of the violin was the screaming of a collapsing building full of children that the Academy hadn’t been able to save, his own shrieks of pain in an empty abandoned world, a little girl’s sobs as the loneliness crushed the air from her lungs and she tried to smother herself in his pillow. Five felt something in his abdomen pop and let himself drop away, through the fabric of spacetime and away from the caustic, irradiating noise.

He popped into the room behind her, stepped wrong and nearly twisted his ankle but managed to fall against her back and send them both sprawling to the floor. She hissed like a pinned cat as he held her, tiny in his arms, writhing against his chest, but he wasn’t strong anymore and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her for long. “Vanya, please, listen to me,” he hissed back frantically, his breath hot against the shell of her ear and the back of her neck and he could smell her skin, it was her, _his_ Vanya.

The time was now. He could have garroted her with his tie or gotten his fingers around her throat, driven his elbow into the space between her shoulder blades and trapped her long enough to grab for his gun. He could end it. Right now, right here. The twisted knee, the sliced hand, the thousands on millions of deaths in fire and unimaginable pain, he could erase it all, the way he’d half decided to.

But she still smelled like his Vanya.

She bucked under him and screamed from the bottom of her lungs, a terrifying banshee wail, and a wall of sonic force slammed him upward, against the ceiling. Five bounced against the removable particle board tiles and ricocheted down to the floor, landing on his formerly-and-again bad knee. Vanya struggled back to her feet, winded, and snarled at him. “Why did you come back?” she demanded. “Why now? Why bother? You--” a sob choked and died in her throat.

Five put his palms up in surrender, and thought of Klaus. _Hello. Good-bye_. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I know.” Five tasted blood and bile. His head was pounding with a dull urgency. This was Vanya older, scraped raw down to the nerves and as feral as he often felt, without minder or master, Vanya unleashed, every carefully swaddled sharp edge of her that he’d once loved on display, haloed in blue light. She was so beautiful that it hurt. “I’m sorry.”

Vanya went utterly still, and the buzzing thrum of pressure that had been pushing at his eardrums ceased. Five could count on one hand the number of times he’d apologized for anything, even to her. When he’d hurt her before, the best he’d do in the aftermath was evade and tacitly acknowledge. They never talked about it. He never sought penance, because Five had always, always believed he was right.

Her face went hard again. “You’re _not_ him. What kind of trick is this?”

“No! Vanya, it’s not-- goddamn it, I’m me.” He was breathing hard, sweat trickling down the back of his neck, sure with every passing second that she might abruptly move to slit his throat with sound alone. “Look at me. I’m not the boy you knew, but I’m me.” She studied him, his face, the set of his shoulders, and said nothing.

She inched closer to him, examining. “Tell me something we would know,” she demanded. “Just us.”

Five closed his eyes. He tried to think of something personal, something that hadn’t been in the book, but it had been so long ago. “We weren’t always friends,” he said. “I ignored you until we were-- nine or ten we must have been, I think. And then Dad gave you that damned violin and I could hear it sometimes, when I was reading, and one day I went to see what all the commotion was about and you were there.” He swallowed thickly, around his heart in his throat. “In the library. And you smiled at me, and I told you that you were murdering my favorite piece of Bach, but that I’d wait around until you got it right.”

“I thought you were going to be like all the others,” she said, quiet, and she sounded like herself again. Like Vanya, not the White Violin. An old resentment was very raw in her voice.

Five laughed, tonelessly. “In the end I was, wasn’t I? Only cared when it was convenient.” He held out a hand to her, entreating. “Let me make it right.”

She paused, and outside sirens began to scream, closer and closer, louder and louder, until red and blue light flashed against the white bare walls of the office. Vanya bit her lip, considering him, and for a moment it made her look younger, girlish, made his heart skip and hurt. Vanya’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, where the tattoo was, and Five gratefully, gladly, took her away from the sirens and the rain and the body by the desk, from all of this.

\---

Under the warm, eternal lights of Griddy’s Donuts, Vanya looked almost normal. A sliver of black was returning around the rims of her eyes, the occlusion fading as she tucked her power back inside herself. There was a spray of bear claw crumbs down the front of her immaculate white shirt. Five sipped his coffee and tried not to let his hands shake.

“Who was that guy?” he asked, mostly just to make small talk.

Vanya drank her coffee, into which she’d tipped two nondairy creamers and a pink packet of Sweet ‘n Low. A disgusting habit she’d developed in his absence, but Five let it go for now. “He deserved it,” she said, a touch defensively.

“Undoubtedly. What for?”

“He was the branch manager of a small local electronics company,” Vanya said. “Every Friday night he would ask his secretaries to stay late, and he’d lock the door behind them. This time I stayed up with him instead.” There was a day-old discarded newspaper languishing on the corner of their booth, and Vanya pulled it over to herself, flipped through to the classifieds. She slid it across the sticky tabletop for Five to peruse, pointing at a particular ad. In two hundred words or less, the column indicated the name of the man, his address, and the nature of his crimes in as much lurid detail as the paper could print. The ad was anonymous. Its header read “For Sale: white violin”.

Five pushed the paper back at her and gulped half his second mug of coffee in one go. He couldn’t believe how viscerally he’d missed a good cup of Griddy’s awful, watery, cheap coffee, and he couldn’t stop thinking that if he kissed her now, Vanya’s mouth would taste like coffee too.

“Quite a career you’ve made for yourself,” he said.

Her hands tightened around her mug. “Everyone abandoned me,” she said, raindrops beginning to spatter against the wide front window. “Everyone. You have no idea what it was like, Five.”

Five bit back all the caustic retorts he wanted to make: that he did know what it was like to be alone, thank you, more than she ever, ever, ever would. He had a quick, sharp tongue and a hairtrigger temper but it was easier to rein in around Vanya, and he needed to. That kind of language wouldn’t be productive. “You’re right,” he said instead. “I don’t.”

There were clouds in Vanya’s coffee, and she watched them shift and settle like silt. “I don’t intend to stop,” she told him, matter-of-fact. “Not even for you.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Five lied. “I’d like to help you, if you let me.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Five,” she said, sounding tired. Now a little of the color was coming back, making her look more human, more exhausted. She’d pulled her hair back in a messy ponytail while Five ordered but some strands were already coming free. Her eyes slid away from him. “The last time I had a partner it didn’t work out that well for me.”

Sick curiosity slid down the back of his spine like cold poison, and for the first time Five felt a tremor of doubt. There had been nothing in either her book or the Commission reports he’d pored over about Vanya having a co-conspirator, at any point. If it had been buried under black marker and redactions, that was a very bad sign. Something fragile, that couldn’t be tampered with. An unknown variable he had no way of accounting for until he coaxed the details from her, which he couldn’t do tonight. Their renewed trust was similarly fragile, tenuous, ready to be ripped right back into the ugliness that also existed between them.

“Not a partner, then,” he said. “An assistant.” She looked at him with tired incredulity.

“Are you _sure_ you’re really Five?” she teased, and it cut almost to the bone. “The Five I knew didn’t even like Dad ordering him around.”

She was right; he hated even the idea of it. Loathed the thought of being out of control, not being able to fix things to his specifications, leaving someone who might be less competent in charge. He just kept remembering his notes, the book, the sight of Klaus’ dead face beneath the rubble of the Academy.

“You’re not Dad,” he told her, and he gave her a private, secret smile that he didn’t have to fake. “I just want-- you don’t have to be alone anymore, Vanya.”

He had her, and he knew it, but there was no satisfaction of feeling that hook hit home and pull her in. He hadn’t known her intimately since they’d been thirteen, but that, and the book, was enough. He knew all her insecurities, weak points, vulnerabilities, exactly where to strike with devastating precision and accuracy to bring her walls down and get back inside.

Manipulating her, and knowing it, felt worse than every contracted murder.

She smiled at him, subtle but real, triumphant in her own way, but there was nothing soft about it. Instead he had the sensation of a steel trap closing around his leg, an acute instinct for danger tripped without any understanding as to why. Vanya could be brutal, he knew: he’d seen all the grainy police procedural Polaroids of her kills, most of which were far less clean than the one he’d witnessed the result of tonight. He knew what had happened to Allison. He had been prepared for feral and wild, grief-stricken Vanya, lashing out at the world.

He hadn’t prepared for cold, settled calculation.

When they stood to go home, _their_ home now, Five had to keep reminding himself, he remembered the diplomatic etiquette lessons that had been drilled into their developing minds as children and held her jacket for her to slide her arms through, feeling like-- well, like Pogo with Dad, a little. It wasn’t the worst feeling, save for the sense of an earthquake under him, shifting tectonic plates about to throw his plans violently up into the air with little warning. At least, he thought, glancing out the window, it had nearly stopped raining.

The door opened before them, and the little welcoming bell rang, drawing Five’s eye. He heard Vanya give a sharp inhale of breath at his side, saw the trio of familiar black-clad figures trudging in out of the dark and wet of the night, and thought: _no, not Griddy’s. We’re not leveling Griddy’s, anywhere but here_. Seeing them alive again, his brothers, meant nothing. They wouldn’t be alive long if he didn’t act. Five put his hand on Vanya’s shoulder and gripped tightly, begging her wordlessly, again, to trust him.

As the blinding light of fractured spacetime enveloped them, he stared straight into Diego’s eyes, enraged and disbelieving, and forced his own face into a haughty sneer, the same expression he’d taunted his siblings with in every trial and training mission for years.

The second after the light died, a knife with a four-inch blade embedded itself in the grease-stained wall behind where Vanya’s head had been.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards._  
>  \--Vladimir Nabokov


End file.
